Today, in the United States, juvenile delinquency is a rising problem, especially among those with disabilities. The rate of recidivism among these youth is becoming a large problem as well, and those with disabilities are exceptionally vulnerable. This study looks into the different patterns of recidivism among disabled, incarcerated youth and different components associated with it. This particular study dealt with 5,435 juveniles with disabilities. They collected their data from the records of the family court intake, in South Carolina department of juvenile justice. They split up the subjects into 3 different subgroups using the latent class analysis model. Each group had different combination or organizational data such as gender, ethnicity (either Caucasian or African American) family income, age at first referral (into the juvenile justice system) first referral offense severity, family delinquency and drug use. The three separate sub groups could be summarized as follows: subgroup 1 were the economically disadvantaged but with fewer problems in family delinquency and drug use, subgroup 2 were the economically better off group with relatively equal racial distributions and subgroup 3 were the African American males who have more families with delinquency history. After the collection, and analysis of their data, researchers concluded that sub group 3 had the highest percentage of juveniles returning to the juvenile justice system. One of their pattern discoveries associated with this find was that group belonging predicted the likelihood of recidivism.

This research was very well preformed. The researchers included many separate factors that have been known to cause recidivism and used prior knowledge and research surrounding this topic to help create a solid project. The most interesting statistic that I learned while reading this study was that while only 8.2% of students in schools have disabilities, disabled students make up 47.7% of the juveniles justice system. That is a horrifying number and tells us that something needs to change in the handling of juvenile delinquency, especially surrounding disabled youth.

Zhang, D., Hsu, H., Katsiyannis, A., Barrett, D. E., & Ju, S. (2011). Adolescents with Disabilities in the Juvenile Justice System: Patterns of Recidivism. Exceptional Children, 77(3), 283-298. doi:10.1177/001440291107700302